18 weeks pregnancy weight gain

18 weeks pregnancy weight gain

Your doctor has probably already told you why pregnancy weight gain is so important for the health of the baby. Woman who piles on too few pounds faces greater risk of miscarriage, while those who add to much more tends to deliver larger babies than is normally expected. You might be wondering why this is considered a problem, as there is a common belief that the larger the baby is born, the healthier he is. However, in reality excessive baby’s weight often leads to various complications during delivery, which can put at risk not only the health of the child, but also that of his mother. Due to the extreme importance of this topic, we decided to write a separate article on 18 weeks pregnancy weight gain.
In order to help you understand where the additional pounds come from, before starting to talk about 18 weeks pregnancy weight gain we will briefly describe the stages of development that the foetus undergoes by that time. As you might already know, even when your baby is just a bunch of cells his sex, eye color and other traits are already determined by a full set of DNR he got from your partner and you. As the fifth week is over, the baby‘s “body” is still just a size of sesame seed, but his heart is already beginning to beat. It will be weeks before you can hear it at parental check up, but it already beats and it does it twice as often as yours. It’s amazing, but by the time the second month is over your 5/8 of an inch long baby will already have growing legs and arms with the little fingers.
As you enter the second semester, your child will already have most of his vital organs functioning, his heart beating so strong that you can hear it at paternal checkup and he will start seeing the light that gets into the womb through your skin. During this new stage pregnancy you should be getting closer to your 18 weeks pregnancy weight gain at faster rate, piling on a couple of pounds during every couple of weeks. Now baby is getting bigger and stronger every day and since you enter the 17th week it becomes very likely that you will feel your child moving inside you.
In order for your baby to be as fit as possible, your 18 weeks pregnancy weight gain should amount to 9-10 pounds. However, this applies only for woman whose body mass index before pregnancy was 18-24.5. Would-be moms who used to have a few too many pounds before conceiving should gain less, while those who were extremely skinny are expected to gain more.